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Ten Ways Your Clients Can Nurture Family CohesivenessTen Ways Your Clients Can Nurture Family Cohesiveness

Invest the thought, energy and time to create close, loving relationships.

Mitzi Perdue

August 24, 2018

11 Slides
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In theory, you can’t put a price on family happiness.

In practice, I think I can put a price on it.

I’m friends with a woman who inherited a billion dollars. Once, when I was mentioning to her that I was going home for Thanksgiving, she told me she would give up her entire inheritance if only she had a family to go home to.

She explained that she and her brother had quarreled. Their quarrel ended up in court, and they haven’t spoken since. She felt that the court case destroyed her ability to ever trust him again. But even so, she’d give up her whole inheritance to have the emotional support of a loving family.

That means, for at least one person, the value of a close, loving family exceeds a billion dollars. I bet for most of your clients, their deepest source of happiness or misery is their family relationships.

In view of this, investing the thought, energy and time to create close and enduring family relationships is as important as anything a family can do.

Frank Perdue understood this, and he wasn’t about to leave it to chance. Busy as he was building a Fortune 500 business, he still put tremendous effort into creating and supporting a culture of family cohesiveness.

When we were courting back in 1988, he told me that having a close family was one of the most important things in his life. People asked me if I was involved in running the business. The answer was no, but I was involved in something equally important to Frank: working to foster a culture that nurtured the family cohesiveness.

Here are some of the things we did that your clients might consider doing:

About the Author

Mitzi Perdue

Mitzi is a businesswoman, author and a master story teller. She holds degrees from Harvard University and George Washington University, is a past president of the 35,000 member American Agri-Women and was one of the U.S. Delegates to the United Nations Conference on Women in Nairobi. She currently writes for the Academy of Women’s Health, and GEN, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.

Most recently, she’s authored Tough Man, Tender Chicken: Business and Life Lessons from Frank Perdue. The book made #5 on Amazon’s Business Biographies, out of a field of 20,000. She’s also the author of, I Didn’t Bargain for This, her story of growing up as a hotel heiress.

A woman of many talents, she also programmed a computer app, B Healthy U, designed to help people track the interactions of lifestyle factors that influence their energy, sleep, hunger, mood, and ability to handle stress. In addition to being a programmer and software developer, Mitzi is also an artist and designer of EveningEggs™ handbags.

In addition, Mitzi the author of more than 1600 newspaper and magazine articles on family businesses, food, agriculture, the environment, philanthropy, biotechnology, genetic engineering, and women’s health.

She was a syndicated columnist for 22 years, and her weekly environmental columns were distributed first by California’s Capitol News and later, by Scripps Howard News Service, to roughly 420 newspapers. For two years she was a Commissioner on the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science.

Mitzi also produced and hosted more than 400 half hour interview shows, Mitzi’s Country Magazine on KXTV, the CBS affiliate in Sacramento, California. In addition, she hosted and produced more than 300 editions of Mitzi’s Country Comments, which was syndicated to 76 stations. Her radio series, Tips from the Farmer to You, was broadcast weekly for two years on the Coast to Coast Radio Network.